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Summer 2025 – LOCAL695.COM 31 and I believe the cast appreciates that as much as Post does. A big thank you to our Set Costumers Janet Jensen and John Ostrander. On season two, episode four, "The Captain's Wife," we had singing and earwig work planned on Jean's impromptu stage takeover. Jean is drinking at the bar and hears the pianist/singer on stage begin to play "Natural Woman" and being a bit tipsy, she heads to the stage and "borrows" the mic and proceeds to finish out the song. We shot for two days on an active (though docked) cruise ship for the episode, but thankfully, this scene was at a large hotel bar near Disney in Anaheim, and thus a little easier to load into. The original plan had been for the entire performance to be pre-recorded and played back for the pianist/singer and Jean. That all changed fairly close to our shoot date and we recorded it all live. The pianist (and eventually Jean) would sing into a Lectro HHa, and I had everything I needed for tracking the piano, but unfortunately the piano lid was closed for camera purposes, so plant mics and specialty instrument mics were used instead. I used a combination of DPA 4099's, Shure BETA 98's, and MKH50's to bring the piano to life. We had lavs on Jean, the pianist, the featured cast, and six professional singers spread throughout the forty-plus background to help everyone singing stay in key. We did plenty of takes, and Jean left it all on the stage that day. It was very satisfying to mix all of the performance elements on location, and I was so happy the first time I was able to see and hear it finished in a theater at the premiere. I know the Post Team labored especially hard on episode four with so many difficult locations and so much going on between stand-up and musical performances. My hats off to John Cook, Ben Wilkins, Brett Hinton, and the entire Post Department for their top- notch work. There was interesting work in multiple seasons where we see young Deborah Vance (played by Olivia Boreham-Wing) doing stand-up comedy and some commercials. For all of those scenes, we pre-recorded Jean's dialog and played it back for young Deborah via earwig to recite lines against green screen or occasionally in front of a live audience as well. We always had Playback Operators and/or Music Recordists come in. Big thanks to "Z"—Jeff Zimmerman, Ryan Pederson, and John Lakin for coming out on our playback and musical performance days. Given the fluidity of our schedule, I kept a modest amount of playback equipment and earwigs on the truck, as well as a 688 bag with an Octopak just in case we need to get portable. Video Assistant Josh Levy was also a great help in locating scenes that he could feed to me and I could then feed to a speaker on set or earwig if there was a last-minute request for the other side of a multi-person phone call requiring the proper timing. In season four, we finally got to spend some time on the Late Night set at Universal Studios. We spent about ten or twelve days shooting the Late Night scenes, most of it was straightforward, though we did have several walk-and-talks that required the bag given the depth and geography of the backstage hallways. We had exposed mics on cast who were appearing on the Late Night show and hidden lavs on all cast that weren't. We hung audience mics for our BG reactions and used a Lectrosonics HHa for our guest comedians and crowd warm-up man. We had "Z" run playback for our show opens, commercial breaks, and closes. Toward the end of our season, we had musical guest Randy Newman with a backing band on the Late Night set and Ryan Pederson was kind enough to come in and handle that. I rarely take on the task of recording full band performances on any of the shows I mix, so it was a lot of fun, especially getting to focus on the cast while Ryan worked his magic recording the band. That day was definitely one of the season's highlights for the entire cast and crew. You never really know how long a show is going to run, especially these days. When I got the call for Hacks, I knew it was going to be fun, and I certainly knew it could go for several seasons. After four seasons, I still can't believe how great the show is, and how much fun it is to work on. This will always be special for me, and fingers crossed I'll be a part of anything even approaching the caliber of this cast and crew in the future. Ryan Fee working the boom